Although ‘Home Automation’ first started to automatically control home appliances from somewhere in the house or from a remote place, the appliances were not connected to each other, and one had to deal with each appliance individually by using telephone or infrared rays. Recently however, all electronic apparatuses are networked together with help of a communication means, and a home network system for integrative control on the network through a controller is going to be available to the public in no time.
FIG. 1 is a diagram illustrating a configuration of the home network system.
As depicted in FIG. 1, the home network system includes a communication bus for interconnecting a plurality of home appliances, such as, refrigerator, washing machine, personal computer (PC), etc.
Particularly, FIG. 2 illustrates a case in which every apparatus' micom has a serial communication function and is directly connected to the communication bus. FIG. 3, on the other hand, illustrates a case in which the micom does not have the serial communication function. In such case, a separate communication module is needed to configure the home network.
The home network generally includes a controller for controlling network system. However, now that almost every house has a personal computer, one can simply install an application program for controlling the network system into the personal computer and use that as network controller.
Even though many homes are already using the home network system now, a lot more work needs to be done on the technologies associated with the controller for displaying a menu screen in order to realize more efficient, simple control of the home network system.
In summary, the conventional home network system has the following problems.
First, home networking among electric home appliances with different standards is not possible since there are a variety of communication standards for configuring a home network.
Second, because Windows XP supports UPnP as operation system, users can set up a home network only with appliances that support UPnP. However, this does not apply to appliances that use 8-bit micom in general.